[game_edu] Brenda Braithwaite's game_edu rant at GDC

[Kenneth Willes]

We designed an Interactive Media curriculum that combined visual design and programming. Our placement rates have been very high in that program and I believe it is in part due to this unique combination. 

But here is where it gets really discouraging. . . As a result of our approach, it was hard to attract art students into that Interactive Media curriculum because of its emphasis on programming. Most of our art students just wanted to design and not be bothered by any sort of programming task whether it was procedural or simple declarative languages like HTML. It was a difficult curriculum for artists to engage with because of the technical side of things and it was difficult for non-artists (computer science students) to consider because of all the visual design training required. 

Despite the program's success, it had low enrollment numbers--too low to continue on. So I'm currently teaching out the remaining students.

We tried to make the curriculum easier without sacrificing quality. One of the things we implemented was a "programming for artists" course using Alice. It was like learning how ride a bicycle with training wheels--you couldn't really make mistakes. The course went really well but I found that afterwards the students still needed more exposure to programming before continuing on to other courses that required the programming skills. 

The next time I taught the class I only focused on Alice for half of the semester and went on to other languages like Python and Actionscript the other half. It turned out better with that approach, but it still seemed like the students needed more exposure to programming. My advanced students who are almost done still have a hard time solving some programming concepts quickly and they have been working with code for a number of years now! It just takes time for students to be fluent with it. 

But I don't think College level teachers should be required to start students out with a programming course at ground zero! We would be better served if students already had that skill under their belt. And not just for the arts, but for every discipline. My niece who is about 8 years old learned how to program with Scratch. Now she is digging into C#. By the time she gets to college, writing a short program that integrates with something like excel will be a simple task. 

I think it is very important for children at a young age to learn how to tell the computer exactly what it is they want to accomplish because we live in a computer mediated society. If kids were required to create games to the same extent they play them, there would be much higher computer literacy rates and people like Brenda wouldn't need to have these kinds of rants anymore--and I wouldn't have to struggle as much as an educator trying to integrate programming into the arts. 

--
Kenneth Willes, MFA
Associate Professor
Southern Adventist University
School of Visual Art and Design
http://art.southern.edu
423.236.2090
________________________________________
From: game_edu-bounces at igda.org [game_edu-bounces at igda.org] On Behalf Of Bill Crosbie [bill.crosbie at gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 08, 2011 2:51 PM
To: IGDA Game Education Listserv
Subject: Re: [game_edu] Brenda Braithwaite's game_edu rant at GDC

Anthony, you make a good point, but may I also point out that the three years at university made you ready to excel in your internship. You weren't doing the specific tasks of industry in school, but you were developing a mindset to be effective. So the question we are grappling with here is how to extend that kind of experience to everyone with the hunger to "go for it" and to do so from the start of their design careers.

I love Jim's idea of going visual (gamemaker, processing) and providing real projects. It reminds me of how I started coding (when you had to enter source from the back of a magazine to play the games... yes...I'm old.)

What strikes me about Jim's approach is it starts with a real goal and relies on the students to work to make the end result possible. It seems that in traditional CS curriculum we start with small building blocks and then if we have time, ask the students to try to assemble these pieces in to a coherent whole at the end of the semester. We lose people along the way to boredom or confusion. There is no framework to structure the individual components and so each concept is seen in isolation from how it is used.

Or something like that.




On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 2:32 PM, Anthony Hart-Jones <tony at dragonstalon.co.uk<mailto:tony at dragonstalon.co.uk>> wrote:
  You may laugh, but apprenticeships might not be such a bad idea.  I learned more about design in a month of work than three years of university.  Take a kid with a good understanding of maths / mechanics and they'd learn more spending a year working in a games studio than a decade in academia.

  As a friend of mine often remarks, your mileage may vary...